The Class Report provides an insight into what brands are most coveted by the best bars across the nation. Hamish Smith explains how the results are achieved.
There’s data on global spirits sales, on UK-centric volumes, and some that even concentrates on the UK on-trade. The Class Report narrows the lens. It seeks to understand what brands, categories and cocktails sell best at the elite end of the wet-led on-trade: the UK’s Best Bars.
And how exactly do we define the UK’s Best Bars, I hear you ask. Well, we are uniquely positioned to do so. Every year we spend the winter and early spring working on precisely that. It’s called the Class Bar Awards – the longest-running and best-attended of its kind in the UK.
Through the Class Bar Awards data – generated from a nationwide poll of our 180-strong panel – we know exactly which bars industry insiders consider the best. From this, we create an invitation list of great bars numbering into the hundreds and finalise the results once we have 100 completed questionnaires – to your right is a selection of some of the bars
that took part.
The poll
This year, we added Bartenders’ Favourite to our survey categories of gin, tequila, vodka, rum, American whiskey, mezcal, Scotch, brandy, liqueurs, non-alcs and mixers. This is a best-of-the-best league – a desert island brand if you will. Winning it might just be the most precious title of them all.
For the rest of the survey, we asked bartenders for their bar’s top-two sellers and created category lists with those brands that received the most votes (which were sequentially weighted).
We don’t only want to get an idea of the bestselling brands in each category, we also want to see if there’s a difference between what bars sell and what brands excite them. There often is – so for each category we create a smaller list called Bartenders’ Favourites.
Where the bestselling list features bigger, established brands, this secondary table would be a nod to the liquids bartenders love, regardless of price, value, customer familiarity or financial incentives. These could well be the bestsellers of the future.
The first list you’ll see though is a widening of the picture to spirits categories – and here we have a new number one spirit, though you’ll have to wait for our 50 Best Cocktails list – it’ll feature in the autumn edition.
So that’s The Class Report in its third iteration. A little expanded from last year, but still a freezeframe of brand performance at the pointy, most influential, end of the pyramid: the UK’s Best Bars.